Caste
devitalises a man. It is a process of sterilisation.Dr BR Ambedkar, Philosophy of Hinduism

Why
all this hullagulla about some remarks and f words used. So
whats the big deal? As though Indians are the holy saints
without abusive words. Actually Indians are the most racist
people on earth. India is the only country where we have schedule
caste system. Is this not racism??? We have Bungis and untouchables.
Who has coined these names? The very Indians brahmans who
play cricket and want to be treated with respect. Piss on
you all cricketers of India.  A posting at an Indian Express email discussion
forum on racism (http://www.indiaexpress.com/news/sports/cricket/20011120-1.html).

India
is a billion-weak nation thirsting for truly international
sporting glory. Every four years, the fact that Olympic success
eludes India is lamented in public fora. Karnam Malleswaris
weightlifting bronze in the 2000 Olympics, PT Ushas
almost-bronze many Olympics ago and fading memories of the
mens hockey teams successive golds offer little
consolation. But the last two decades have seen a phenomenal
hard-sell of cricket. Though cricket is truly an uninternational
sport  played by hardly 12 nations, all of them former
colonies of the British empire  Indias success
in the 1983 World Cup, followed by the hosting of the Reliance
Cup in the Subcontinent, and the subsequent television boom
spurred by the policy of liberalisation (a very
clever word), corporate sponsorship and subsidisation, resulted
in cricket effectively being marketed as the game that mattered.
Cricket, like popular cinema, became a product of mass consumption,
especially after one-day games became a regular fixture. More
physical sports such as hockey and football have been effectively
jettisoned for the gentlemans game.

The celebration
and success of the movie Lagaan as a nice little good-vs-evil,
David-vs-Goliath tale must be understood in this context.
Lagaan has won an Oscar nod for inclusion in the best
foreign film lineup. After a year of hype and accolades
in the Indian media and deft packaging for select Western
festival circuits and in Hollywood, producer-actor Aamir Khan
seems to have almost pulled off what he set out to achieve.

About
the same time that Lagaans nomination for the Oscar
made news, Indian newspapers and television channels devoted
more than the usual space to some unusual cricket news. In
Madras, Karnataka had won the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank
Cor-poration National Cricket Championship for the Blind,
defeating Delhi. A liberal-secular newspaper which
has no qualms calling itself The Hindu (February 13-14, 2002)
extensively reported the tournament and even carried two-column
pictures. Tamil television channels covered it as the soft
story of the day in their news bulletins. It looks like
the World Cup for the Blind will be hosted by Madras in December
2002. Some multi-national corporation, driven by late-capitalist
guilt and the we-care spirit, might sponsor that
event too.

As I begin
this, I feel weighed down by the burden of addressing (the
liberal?) readers of Himal on the regressiveness
of a film like Lagaan, and even more weighed down by the prospect
of convincing them that cricket in India has been a truly
casteist game  a game best suited to Hinduism. Burdened,
because even those most critical of overriding nationalism
jump with joy when their national team wins. In fact, as a
friend points out apart from eating with our fingers,
unfortunately both cricket and Hindi films unite South Asians.
For a Subcontinent that so obsessively watches cricket and
Hindi cinema, Lagaan offers cinema-as-cricket and cricket-as-cinema.
In the Hyderabad of mid-1990s, as a university-bound hostelite
watching a one-day match in the common room I saw all groups
and communities cheering for India. Telugu-speaking
Dalits, Oriyas, Malayalis, brahmans, Kannadigas, M.Tech students
alike would all come in identifiable gangs, reserve seats,
and be united by cricket even if they had battles
to fight outside the common room. The other programmes that
drew huge collective viewership were film song-countdowns
in Hindi and Telugu.

To understand
the vulgarity of Lagaan one needs be alive to who actually
plays cricket in India, even as the myth is fabricated that
everybody can participate in the game  you open a can
of Coke and a sixer materialises or a wicket falls, so you
keep consuming Coke for the team and the nations good,
as Aishwarya Rai leads by example during commercial breaks
between overs. Even as direct participation in cricket seems
an impossibility for most Indians  one half of the population,
women, are effectively excluded  it encourages them
to become consumers of the game irrespective of their caste,
class, gender and religion. You consume cricket like Aishwarya
consumes Coke in the advertisement. Quite the same happens
with cinema produced in Madras or Bombay. Even when the hero
 be it Rajinikant, MG Ramachandran, Chiranjeevi or Aamir
Khan  is on most occasions discoursing against the Dalits,
OBCs, women and Muslims (subalterns), there are
millions of fans from these very groups who identify with
their filmic presence: consumption, with the illusion of participation.
And, in a nation of one billion only 14 can make it to the
national team. Yet, during a one-day match even
the poor who cannot afford a TV, or when they can, are unable
anyway to afford the pay channel that beams the match, congregate
outside electronics shops and watch the game even as pockets
get picked. Lagaan, which partakes of and perpetuates this
folklore of cricket as universal social solvent, lends itself
very eminently to a casteist reading precisely
because of its thematic inflections and its choice of things
to celebrate and suppress.

Lagaan:
Millennial Purana
Lagaan is like one of those many Hindu puranas,
literally stories of old, which have scant regard
for historicity, and which in fact revel in their ahistoricity.
Puranas are mostly brahman-written mythologies that dwell
upon the imagined feats and lore of brahmanical gods and goddesses.
Like all else in brahmanic Hinduisms self-representation,
puranas excel in obfuscation and myth-making  all towards
keeping the (aryan-vedic) caste and patriarchal status quo
intact. Lagaan is one such purana of the new millennium, an
accretion to the quintessentially brahmanic myth-making tradition.
That Lagaans story and direction are by a brahman (Ashutosh
Gowariker) is not incidental, though a Muslim (Aamir Khan)
parades as the most public face of the film.

The brahamanical game: Indian
fielders appealing.

Set in
1893, Lagaan is the story of how the residents of Champaner,
a village in Awadh (modern Uttar Pradesh), master the game
of cricket in three months and defeat the British cantonment
team. The wager is that the British would not impose tax (lagaan)
for the next three years if Champaner wins the match; if it
loses, the entire province should pay a triple levy. Ap-proaching
cricket as the white mans pompous version of gilli-danda,
the Champaner XI wins the game under the leadership of Bhuvan
(Aamir Khan) aided by a fair-minded white lady
(Elizabeth, sister of villainous British officer Russell who
challenges Bhuvan).

Lagaan
is being celebrated by secularists, national-ists, subalternists,
leftists, pseudo-secularists, BJPites, academics, critics
and filmgoers alike. Columnists and academicians distanced
themselves from the loud and jingoistic Gadar and tested their
analytical abilities on the subtleties of Lagaan. (The film
has generated three articles, and counting, in Economic and
Political Weekly.) Profiling Aamir Khan soon after the Oscar
call, The Indian Express (17 February, 2002) said Lagaan won
the battle of the imagination in a way Gadar didnt.
The film, brimming with nationalism and the charm of
cricket, was the right one for the Oscars, the report
said. In post-Hindutva India, Lagaan (unlike Gadar) seems
to offer the liberal-secular brigade something to cheer about.

Fretting
over the prolonged marginalisation of the rural
and the peasantry in Hindi cinema, Sudhanva Deshpande
in a recent Himal article (Hindi Films: The Rise of
the Consumable Hero, August 2001) sees hope in Lagaan.
Deshpande looks for the banished peasant in Hindi
cinema of 1980s and 1990s and nostalgically mourns the absence
of the rural or urban labouring classes dancing and
singing with the hero(ine). He concludes, This
is why Aamir Khans home pro-duction, Lagaan, is so refreshing.
(And it is Sunny Deol-Gadar which makes him run into the arms
of Aamir Khan, who, never mind, may well have campaigned for
the BJP in Uttar Pradesh had he not been busy with the Oscar
lobbying.) As if the rural/the peasantry was ever portrayed
in all its feudal and casteist-patriarchal ugliness by Hindi
cinema from 1950s to 1970s. In this framework, anything rural
seems to be desirable from a class perspective. Hence we can
forgive the fact that women have to bear the markers of rurality
and tradition: Hindi cinema has never been
naturalistic, so there is no point complaining that the girls
look anything but peasant. But today, the heroes do not have
any peasantry watching their passage.

Deshpande
also selectively forgets the utterly feudal leitmotif that
is not just confined to Hindi, but also extends to Telugu
and Tamil cinema as well: where the very-rural hero (played
with masculine aggression by MGR, Sivaji Ganesan, Rajinikant,
Vijaykanth, Akkineni Nageswar Rao, NT Rama Rao, Chiranjeevi,
Balakrishna and other worthies) is pitted against the urban-educated
heroine dressed in trendy, tight clothes. Invariably,
she rides a car, confronts the bullock cart-driving hero,
abuses him in English in the presence of his and her friends,
but ultimately (after some songs and dances) is tamed/rescued
and ends up in the final frame in a sari, touching the feet
of her husband and the in-laws. (Alternatively, in case the
male character is a city-bred modern and the female
rural/rustic, she is raped by the man. The man would be the
villain, and the victimised woman the heros
sister who, unable to bear the shame commits suicide;
or, if the film is progressive, the hero ensures
that his sister marries the now-sheepish rapist after making
him see reason in a macho way.) This trend has continued till
the 1990s down south, and even Govinda as Coolie No. 1 (a
remake of a Telugu 1990s film starring Venkatesh and Tabu),
whom Deshpande celebrates for his proletarian image
teaches the pride (guroor)-filled heroine a lesson, tames
her, puts her in her place. In such a reading, Manmohan Desai
becomes the original postmodernist Bombay director,
with a thorough (and often delightful) contempt for logic
and meaning. Just as much as all Hindu mythologies are
the first magical-realist texts (we did it all first/it is
all in the vedas). Marquez and Lyotard can take a walk.

Coming
back to Lagaan, it is not such a great hit in box-office terms.
In industry lingo it is an A-class hit, reports
the Indian Express, meaning its popularity is confined to
metros and urban pockets. (I watched it reluctantly in December
2001 in Madras, some six months after it was released. It
was playing only morning-show in a cinema which accommodates
about 180 people, but whose cheapest ticket is Rs 80.) Deshpande
notes that the economics of film pro-duction has altered
dramatically, and those who now account for the profits of
the industry are simply not interested in watching sweaty
peasantry. Why then, has Lagaan succeeded? It must have been
the cricket theme which, as in real life, manages to unite
passions across classes and international borders. But
this modern Gandhian purana is dangerous as far Dalits and
women are concerned.

Take Champaner,
the village from where our caste-Hindu hero Bhuvan leads the
banner of revolt. For a long stretch in the film, Champaner
 where men wear kurtas and vests ordered fresh (by Oscar-winning
Bhanu Athaiya) from the nearest Khadi Gramodyog Bhandar and
women are dressed in ethnic Rajasthani colours (starched spotless
white if they happen to be widows)  is presented as
some caste-free utopia. There is religion of course: temple
rituals, the Radha-Krishna myth, some namaz-doing Muslims
with fez caps, and the visiting Sardarji.

Suddenly,
when Bhuvans team is training under the supervision
of the white mlechcha woman, we spot Kachra, the untouchable,
standing on the mar-gins  literally  as the ball
rolls before him. Bhuvan asks Kachra to throw the ball back.
A petrified Kachra, with a small broom in his right hand,
his left hand handicapped, is sweating. Hero Bhuvan goads
him to throw the ball, and Kachra does it with his disabled
left hand. The ball spins wildly. Bhuvan is terribly impressed
and wants to rope Kachra in as the eleventh man they have
been looking for. Predictably, the entire village from mukhiya
(chief) to vaid (doctor) to jyotish (astrologer) opposes the
move to induct an achchut (untouchable). They say: fight the
British with a silly game if you please, but dont commit
dharam-bhrasht (sacrilege). Meaning, keep your hands off religion,
kid. When the British tread on your toes, you can justifiably
fight them, but practices like untouchability are legacies
not to be questioned. Surprisingly, while Kachra poses a problem,
being tutored in the game by a mlechcha white woman (Elizabeth)
is not problematic.

Bhuvan
assumes the reformers role and launches into a speech,
saying even Bhagwan Ram had eaten the fore-bitten fruit of
Sabari and that he had decried untouchability. While most
versions of the Rama-yana refer to the episode where Rama
beheads the shudra Sambhuka for daring to recite the vedas
despite being ordered to stop, in Ashutosh Gowarikars
2001 recall of the tale there is selective forgetting. From
being an upholder of the patriarchal caste system, Rama refigures
here as someone who was against caste discrimination. This
is of a piece with even apparently progressive elements in
modern India refusing to reckon with caste. In fact, at the
intellectual level there is an effort to defend good
Hinduism vis-à-vis the bad Hinduism
(Hindutva) of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its affiliates.
In this defence of good Hinduism by a range of
intellectuals (explicitly by Ashis Nandy and implicitly by
left-secular-liberal anti-BJP voices) an issue
like caste never figures, and when it does, caste has something
to do with others  OBCs to Dalits. Caste is not something
that you have, since it is always what others embody. In such
a reconstruction, Gandhian ramarajya and Gandhis Rama
continue to be defended by even communist ideologues like
AB Bardhan (Member of Parliament) in the context of the Babri
Masjid demolition. Thus, in a Communist Party of India booklet,
Sangh Parivars Hindutva Versus The Real Hindu
Ethos (De-cember 1992), Bardhan, immediately after noting
that 6 December is Ambed-kars death anniversary, quotes
Das-arath (Ramas father in Ramayana):

Raghukul
reet sada chali aaye
pran jaaye par vachan na jaaye (This is the eternal law of the Raghu clan. Life may be
forfeit, but never the word once given.)

Rama honoured
his pledge to the letter, says Bardhan, who then accuses RSS-VHP-BJP
Rama-bhaktas of not behav-ing like Rama, goes on to refer
to Golwalkar (former chief of the RSS) asGuruji,
approvingly quotes Vivekananda, and invokes Gandhijis
sanatana dharma, and even Sardar Patel and Bankim Chandra
Chattopadhyay.

Thus far and no further: Kissing is jootha.

Selling
good Hinduism and its decencies is more than just a passing
issue in the film and a gauge of its significance is that
the sequence following Kachras entry is the only moment
where an internal problem forces a confrontation in the film.
All other flimic confrontations are with the external Other
 the white, British male. Here again, Bhuvan effects
a selective reordering of the mythic past (Rama is no historical
figure anyway) in quite the same way that AB Bardhan defends
Gandhis Rama as opposed to the Rama of LK
Advani (the BJP leader who led the rath yatra that some years
later culminated in the demolition of the Babri mosque). It
was in a similar vein that Gandhi, when confronted by a well-read
Ambedkar who threw the book(s) at him, defended both the caste
system and Rama in a personalised interpretation, and in fact
swore to establish ramarajya  a Dalits and womans
nightmare  again a selective imagining of the past which
dodges issues like caste and patriarchy. (See the Gandhi-Ambedkar
debate on Annihilation of Caste in Vol. 1 of Ambedkars
Writings and Speeches.)

In the
Lagaan purana, since wasting too much time on the Dalits
token entry would be futile, the villagers are easily won
over by Bhuvans falsified invocation of the maryada
purushottam (ideal superman, as Rama is referred
to fondly). Besides sounding apologetic, the Dalit here is
wordless; almost as if he is also dumb. The subaltern cannot
speak. Totally stripped of agency, Kachra (in Hindustani,
it also means waste or garbage) has to simply follow caste-Hindu
Bhuvans words. He never exercises a choice. Kachra 
someone excluded from every other social-cultural-religious
aspect of village life  is never asked whether he would
like to be included in such a game. It is not clear whether
this Dalit, portrayed so pathetically, is even aware of why
the game is being played.

Till the
introduction of this Dalit character, Dalits and, indeed,
caste never figures in the cinematic village. The brahman
is conspicuous by his absence, except as the priest in the
background with no dialogue. In fact, no character seems to
be caste-marked in the pristine village  the Gandhian
ideal. It is only Kachra who bears the burden of caste identity.
From the raja to Bhuvan we are not made aware of anybodys
caste. Now, do the untouchables of Champaner live in separate
quarters? Who are the other untouchables in the village? (There
cant be just one!) Do they approve of Kachra being part
of the team? The rest of the villagers  Bhuvan, Lakha
and others  are constantly referred to as farmers/peasants
who own land (though they are never shown participating in
any farmerly activity). Hence the lagaan (double, triple levy,
whatever) affects them. But what about the landless and rightless
untouchables? How does the lagaan, or the cricket match that
will liberate Champaner and Awadh from this burden, affect
the Dalits? What is the problem that Dalits have with the
white coloniser-state? Are not their problems more linked
to the caste-colonialism sustained by the raja and the caste
Hindus of the village?

Gandhian
concepts are liberally sprinkled in the film. In the scene
where Bhuvan is introduced, he is shown trying to save a deer
from falling prey to the British officers bullets. In
1893, in a village untouched by the material aspects of modernity
and modern notions of conservation, we have reason enough
to believe that venison could be eaten by villagers too. It
is not as if deer were not killed by anyone till the white
sahibs went on shikaar (hunting for sport) expeditions. Just
as you wonder if the local raja would not have indulged in
similar hunting adventures, the construct of the caste-unmarked
villager upholding vegetarianism and ahimsa (non-violence)
lays the ground for a later scene where the raja espouses
veggie power. In a scene where Captain Russell (once again)
plays the arrogant white man who challenges an effete raja
to eat meat, the latter refuses on the ground that it would
be against his religious beliefs. If the raja eats the meat,
the lagaan (tax) would be waived, says Russell. Whoever has
heard of vegetarian kings in late-19th century? But as in
other convenient obfuscations of caste in the film, the raja
never identifies himself as kshatriya. His vegetarianism
and his tendency to avoid violence simply mean a double-tax
burden on the peasants.

The forcible
inclusion of the Dalit-Kachra in the team also comes across
as a Gandhian moment. While Ambedkar was a votary of the direct
action method  where Dalits would physically assert
their civic rights and democratise public spaces, even if
this resulted in temporary violence  Gandhi wanted caste
Hindus to feel remorse and guilt and thus voluntarily ask
the untouchables to participate in the general village life
 from accessing brahmanic temples to water tanks. (See
Ambedkars What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to
the Untouchables, Volume 9, Writings and Speeches).
In Lagaan this translates into caste Hindus, led by Bhuvan,
repenting their casteism in a sudden moment of awakening.
The vaid, an elderly character who initially opposes Kachras
entry, thanks Bhuvan for opening their eyes. This
scene lends credence to the much-repeated journalistic inanity:
that cricket is a religion in India, and that cricket unites
the nation (acknowledging by default that there are a thousand
factors that actually divide the nation!).

Disability
and untouchability
Irrespective of the result of the game and Kachras performance
in it, the status of Dalits will remain the same. Bhuvans
impassioned plea to the village elders is limited
to Kachras inclusion in the team  and this is
decided by accident  and is not about the larger social
exclusion of the untouchables. What comes across as being
most obnoxious is that after all the drama over Kachras
inclusion, we are told that he is a good spinner not because
of ability, but because of his disability. The token Dalit
is further Dalitised. When Kachra wants to throw the ball
with his normal hand, know-all Bhuvan insists
he use the disabled hand. Kachras being an untouchable
is hardly significant; his disability is. Kachras talent
is not based on merit, the will to excel or the determination
to defeat an enemy, like Bhuvans is. It, like untouchability,
comes with birth. And it is Bhuvan who discovers this innate
talent. Kachra knows nothing.

Kachras
character is supposed to be based on Baloo Palwankar, the
first world-class spinner the country produced (1910s, 1920s).
Baloo, a left-armer, was a Dalit, and an inspiration to the
young Ambedkar. Baloo, however, went on to become a Congressman,
was member of the Harijan Sevak Sangh, and part of the Gandhian
team that forced Ambedkar to sign the Poona Pact. (The pact
by which Ambedkar gave up his demand of separate electorates
for Dalits following an indefinite fast undertaken by Gandhi.)
Baloo later went on to contest an election against Ambedkar.
But Lagaan is an insult to Baloo and Dalits in general. The
way Lagaan manipulates Kachra is representative of how mainstream
society, histories, and nationalisms have dealt with Dalits.
It is also reflective of how cricket has dealt with Dalits.
Independence India has produced not one Dalit cricketer. (Vinod
Ganpat Kambli and Doddanarasiah Ganesh, both with short-lived
careers, are being talked about as the only post-1947 Dalit
cricketers but Kanadiga friends inform me that Ganesh could
be a backward caste gowda and Kambli, it appears,
is from a fisherman caste and technically not Scheduled Caste.)

It is
not as if cricketers have had not had deformities. There have
been spinners such as Indias BS Chandrasekhar, Australias
John Gleeson (called the mystery spinner by the Englishmen)
and Sri Lankas best-known non-Sinhala player, Muthiah
Muralitharan who have had deformities  Chandra was stricken
by polio in childhood and both Gleeson and Murali have congenitally
bent elbows. But, the juxtaposition of disability and untouchability
is very disturbing.

Such a
rationalising of a Dalits ability, coming as it does
in the post-Mandal post-liberalisation phase where
the brahmanical/statist mood is pronouncedly anti-affirmative
action, is an ontological and epist-emological assault on
Dalits and disabled people. It makes a mockery of Dalit merit.
Not only is an untouchable forced into the team on caste-Hindu
terms, his ability is seriously undermined by his lack of
self-control over his talent. Kachra spins the ball not because
he knows how to, but because his (polio-afflicted?) hand is
not normal. Normally, Dalits are not talented.
But Kachras inclusion gets celebrated as a triumph
of meritocracy (Boria Majumdar, Economic and Political
Weekly, 1-7 September, 2001). This is just salt in the wound.

Would
Lagaan sans Kachra-the-handicapped-Dalit have made it less
of a success or the great film it is supposed to be? Since
there have anyway been only two alleged Dalits in post-British
Indian cricket, would the absence of Kachra have made a difference
to the script? Despite the Dalit issue figuring in the World
Conference Against Racism at Durban last September, the generally
racist Oscar committee is unlikely to have heard of it; but
it is these little clever touches that make Lagaan what it
is. According to Tamil filmmaker Rajiv Menon and cricket historian
Majumdar (EPW), Lagaan is supposed to herald the arrival of
the Dalit in Hindi cinema. For the first time, a Dalit is
being positively portrayed in colour cinema, they feel. It
is the acknowledgement of caste (in passing) and its negotiation/accommodation
on casteist/brahmanic terms that makes Lagaan the darling
of the liberal-seculars. Moreover, it is Kachras socially
and physically disabled presence that offers an ideal foil
to Bhuvans sheer physicality (well-toned body, clean-shaven
looks, a doting girlfriend, and overall leadership qualities).
Lagaan had to have a Dalit. But it also had to make his talent
a congenital physical problem.

At the
end of the one-hour forty-two minute climax of the film, and
of the cricket match in it, Kachra with a bat presents an
abject picture: someone utterly useless to the team when it
matters (while he is not using his disabled arm to turn the
old ball). Since both Bollywood cinema and Hindu puranas thrive
on the miraculous and the fantastic, we could have had the
disabled Kachra pulling off a six of the last ball. But the
Dalit cannot be given such definitive history-making agency.
Such things are best left to caste Hindus. By sheer accident,
a no-ball and a single result in hero-Bhuvan taking control
to hoist the winning six.

Kachras
derogatory inclusion is not the only token moment in the film.
There are many such concerning women. When Bhuvans team
is preparing for the match ahead, heroine Gauri (essayed by
Gracy Singh) keeps pestering the players to eat. She is unaware
of being the frivolous woman who does not understand the significance
of the match. (Though in another, earlier scene she offers
the sole moral support to Bhuvan when he is beleaguered.)
The white woman Elizabeth knows better. Gauri also shows other
typical female behavioural traits established in the tradition
of Hindu mythologies and epics  jealousy, envy, pettiness,
the ability to sing and dance, make good food, pine 
all reinforced by popular cinema. The women of the village
contribute to the game by sewing up pads and gloves and other
cricketing paraphernalia. And of course they cook, serve food,
and cheer the home team. If indeed the film offers several
Bakhtinian moments of inversion  unconventional bowling
action, dress and general behaviour considered unsuitable
to the game, and finally the fantastic triumph of the oppressed
(if you will) possible only in the sporting arena and not
in politics  why are such inversions and role reversals
not genuinely extended to women and Dalits? Why could we not
have had a Lagaan where a few talented women  someone
who can bowl because of her skill in keeping the birds away
from the drying grain in the courtyard with well-aimed stones,
and some other who invents the sweep shot from endless practice
in sweeping the house, and a third who makes an excellent
slip fielder because she catches all that a drunk husband
throws at her, and suchlike  too entered the team?

This is
where caste and patriarchy limit the filmic imagination. And
Lagaan becomes a success. Aamir plays the true
macho male who teases his obvious object of romantic love
 the classic village belle. Bhuvans Rama-like
character has shades of the mythic Krishna too. While Gauri
is alive to the sexual tension between Bhuvan and Elizabeth
 who even expresses it  the hero is blissfully
unaware of these dynamics though he sings of himself as Kanha
(the folksy Krishna) in the song Radha Kaise Na Jale? In yet
another of those token moments, Elizabeth, besides her crush
on Bhuvan, is shown developing respect for local traditions
 she stealthily participates in the Holi celebrations,
prays at the village temple, and even applies sindoor on her
forehead.

Lagaan,
while claiming to recreate a piece of imagined history, ends
up being yet another clever brahmanical tale that offers no
progressive relief. But for a genuine understanding of how
Lagaan uses cricket, and how a Dalit is abused by Lagaans
cricket we need to look at cricket in India, and sport as
such, with a caste lens.

Cricket,
brahmanism, bodies
Who really plays cricket in India? I am not a historian of
the game, but it does not require much disciplinary training
to infer that cricket is a game that best suits brahmanical
tastes and bodies, and that there has been a preponderance
of brahman cricket players at the national level. Bored princes
and Parsis bent on mimicking the white sahibs might have been
the first to take to the game in the Subcontinent, and we
eventually had the Bombay Pentagular (communal cricket as
it was called till 1946, where teams called Hindus, Mohammedans,
Parsis, Europeans and Rest played each other), but post-1947
it has been a game mono-polised by brahmans and brahmanical
castes. Little wonder Ashis Nandy, chronicler of modern Hinduism
who dedicated one of his books to VD Savarkar, thinks cricket
is a game naturally suited to Hinduism. Some commentators
see cricket as truly vedantic. As Nandy has it, it is less
Victorian/British and more Indian/Hindu.

Maybe
we need to take this considered view seriously. Compared to
other modern team sports such as hockey or football, cricket
hardly involves much physical activity. A cricketer can stay
put in one place for a long time. Even a fast bowler expends
energy in short spells and cools off at the boundary. Besides,
fast bowlers are not what India is known for, except for Kapil
Dev, a meat-eating jat. We do not need too much statistical
backing to assert that Indian cricketers have excellent personal
records at the expense of the team. Sachin Tendulkar might
top the batting averages in test and one-day cricket, but
as a team India would be in some low-down position. The more
Sachin scores centuries, the less India wins  to be
precise, only two centuries of Sachins ten result in
an Indian test win. (In a February 2002 Wisden list of 100
all-time best one-day innings, Sachin, who has more one-day
runs than anyone else, figures in the 23rd place.) Such a
strange statistic is unlikely to be available in say, hockey:
Dhanraj Pillay scoring the maximum goals during a tournament
and the team being in the dumps.

Left
to right: The 1956 Indian field hockey Olympic team, which
won the country's sixth consecutive gold. Vinod Kambli
smiles, Anil Kumble bowls.

No sport
will tolerate such neglect of bodies as cricket in India.
Take Sunil Gavaskar or Gundappa Vishwanath, conservative brahmans
both, who could not have afforded their brahman priest-like
paunches and dormant slip-fielding if they had been playing
a more physical game like hockey. Not surprisingly, hockey,
which has been called the de jure national game
of India (cricket being the de facto national game post-1983),
has drawn players predominantly from Dalit, adivasi, OBC,
Muslim and Sikh communities. (Indias most celebrated
hockey player, Dhyan Chand, though, was a brahman who joined
the First Brahman Regiment at Delhi in 1922 as a sepoy.)
Moreover, a game like cricket involves a colossal waste of
time. Historically, it was a sport only the leisured class
could indulge in. Before the advent of the one-day form, which
purists continue to smirk at, it would a take a full six days
for a match to be played (rest day included). At the end of
it, in many cases there is not even a result to show for the
time spent. Spectators too must have surplus time on their
hands  one must be able to waste five whole workdays
on a test match. Even in the result-oriented one-day format,
a whole day needs to be spared (even to watch the game on
television). But such has been the craze for cricket, that
for the recent one-day fixture at Madras between India and
the visiting England team, the local government declared a
public holiday to enable its citizens to watch the match.
Such gestures have of course become common.

In sharp
contrast, a hockey match is likely to yield results in about
two hours. And despite the Indian hockey teams recent
wonderful performances, the game is never likely to recapture
the public imagination. Most important, Dhanraj, Thirumavalavan,
Dilip Tirkey, Jude Menezes, Lazarus Balra or Pargat Singh
are unlikely to win the confidence of the publicity managers
of Pepsi or Coke. They are also unlikely candidates for promoting
credit cards (Add to this the fact that cricket players tend
to be a fairer lot compared to hockey players. And TV and
cinema have always promoted an Indian brand of racism that
excludes the darker-looking majority).

This marginalisation
also owes to the social backgrounds of hockey players, and
they are unlikely to make much headway in brahman-dominated
cricket. After the monopoly of Maharashtra brahmans in the
1970s and 1980s, the 1990s saw Karnataka send in its brahman
pack of Anil Kumble, Sunil Joshi, Rahul Dravid, Javagal Srinath
(dubbed the worlds fastest vegetarian bowler)
and Venkatesh Prasad (a fast bowler who runs all the way only
to off-spin the ball). Dodda Ganesh and David Johnson were
their non-brahman contemporaries whose careers, not surprisingly,
were short-lived. While Johnson played just one international
match, Ganesh did hang around for some time. Sunil Joshi persisted
longer than Ganesh, but the four other Karnataka brahmans
have been mainstays in the national eleven. There
have been several occasions when up to nine out of eleven
players have been brahmans in the team. Let me substantiate
this with a quote by Shekhar Gupta, editor, Indian Express:
Harbhajan is seen as the fighting new Indian, non-English
speaking, definitely non-brahman (in a team usually boasting
8 of them) and not from Bombay or Bangalore, the nurseries
of Indian cricket, but from a small town in Punjab from where
most immigrants to Britain come. So you know where that never-say-die
spirit of the Southhall Sikh comes from (26 March, 2001).

Having
too many brahmans means that you play the game a little too
softly, and mostly for yourself. Lets get a Gupta sound-byte
again: After he [Alan Donald] bowled the heart out of
this, the so-called best batting line-up in the world, at
Port Elizabeth in December 1992, he said the Indians were
nice guys. But they were not very good at fighting. They
dont want to handle pace. They hit a few shots and then
get out, he said. This team lost twice in Australia,
South Africa, West Indies, and England and at home to both
Pakistan and South Africa. They lost even the old label of
tigers at home. They were not prepared for close finishes,
cracked up in crunch matches and were so easily overawed by
the rivals aggressive body language. There was no other
reason for them to lose to Pakistan at Madras and Calcutta
(1999) and to South Africa at Bombay and Bangalore last year.

Harbhajans
and Kamblis are exceptions. We are not going to see cricket
at the national level being taken over by meat-eating Dalits,
Muslims and Sikhs and some much-needed team spirit ushered
in. But how does a game, which I argue is inherently brahmanical,
and which draws upon such a small social base, continue to
hijack the nations imagination? In most modern nation-states,
sport has been one area which mar-ginalised groups have used
to showcase their talent. Be it Maradona or Pele, Mike Tyson
or Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan, or in more recent times
the fantastic success of Venus and Serena Williams in a game
dominated by the rich whites, or the several athletics successes
from poor African nations, or the case of gymnasts from East
European nations, sport has been an avenue for making ones
way up from slums and ghettoes to podiums. But in India, the
caste system forecloses such possibilities. While we have
academic studies by African-American scholars comparing basketball
and jazz as truly black sites of creative expression, in India
we cannot even posit something like a Dalit/unbrahman sport
(though the very thought of a sport dominated by brahamans
sounds funny). We are forced to merely record how many Dalits
ever got into the Indian eleven. It almost becomes
the same as looking at how many Dalits sing Carnatic music
or dance the Bharatanatyam.

The hegemony
of cricket in India not only eclipses other team sports like
hockey, but makes the media, state and the public very quickly
dump and forget a Malleswari or a Limba Ram (a well-known
adivasi archer of the mid-1990s). But invoking caste and casteism
in sport begs the question: if cricket is a game where unfit
brahman men simply amble along, why is it that in other modern
sports nonbrahman Indian men and women seem to lag behind?
Why does Olympic glory seem to be a larger subcontinental
problem? For answers, I suggest that we understand how the
caste system, prevalent in South Asia, and most explicitly
in the Subcontinent, could possibly disable the emergence
and formation of bodies that could physically
rise up to competition from the best. This might seem quite
a racist and politically/scientifically wrong
proposition to make, but consider what Ambedkar wrote some
seven decades ago:If
caste is eugenic, what sort of a race of men should it have
produced? Physically speaking the Hindus are a C3 people.
They are a race of pygmies and dwarfs stunted in stature and
wanting in stamina. It is a nation 9/10ths of which is declared
to be unfit for military service. This shows that the Caste
System does not embody the eugenics of modern scientists.
It is a social system which embodies the arrogance and selfishness
of a perverse section of the Hindus who were superior enough
in social status to set it in fashion and who had authority
to force it on their inferiors. (Annihilation of Caste,
1936.)

The statement
might seem crude and reductionist, but if an entire population
was forced to breed for some 2000 years within extremely restrictive
patriarchal sub-caste specificities, the theoretical possibility
of choosing mates is drastically reduced and there is extensive
sub-caste inbreeding. And we are talking about a situation
where even today a Tamil-brahman, more specifically a vadakalai-iyyengar
of a particular gotra (now figure that out!), does not look
for a mate in an equivalent sub-caste grouping in neighbouring
Andhra Pradesh or Karnataka. In fact, the socially mobile
Tamil-brahman even if s/he is in Delhi/Bombay or Detroit seeks
an alliance only in the sub-caste and sub-group, sub-region-wise
suitable sub-community. Since the category of caste has been
abandoned in censuses vis-à-vis caste Hindus, we have
data only on the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Dalits
and adivasis) who officially account for 4685 communities.
With this figure, we can imagine how many sub-castes and sub-communities
there might be among the rest of the 77.5 per cent population.
Even if we do not take into consideration adivasis, in a country
where couples marrying outside caste are forced to commit
suicide (as in many much-highlighted cases in Uttar Pradesh
and Haryana), there are strictures against inter-marriage
in all caste-bound communities. To suggest that such massive
forced inbreeding is likely to produce weak bodies, in Ambedkar
words a nation 9/10ths of which is declared to be unfit
for military service, is not too wild I hope.

It is
such a context  where a billion bodies cannot yield
a single Olympic gold  that results in a much-unplayed
game like cricket becoming the preoccupation of a caste-ridden
nation. In the parent country, England, cricket is hardly
the most popular game, football being the game that matters.
However, English cricket today, led by a Madras-born Muslim,
is more ethnically rep-resentative and balanced than perhaps
any other, though there are fewer blacks and more Asians now.
While Indian cricket is dogged by casteism, in South Africa
cricket practises racism by omission: some 15 years after
the nation formally gave up apartheid, there have been few
black players. Ditto for Zimbabwe. In both these African nations,
football remains the basic male sporting pas-time. In Australia
(or New Zealand), the game does enjoy pop-ularity but this
nation equally keenly follows other sports, and has even yielded
an aboriginal Olympic gold medallist in Cathy Freeman. It
is in the Subcontinent that we seem so fixated on cricket.
And caste.

India/Bollywood
produces films like Lagaan because it patronises a game like
cricket. And cricket rules because the brahmanical caste system,
with is bedrock as inequality, continues to grip India. Much
of the obsession/addiction to cricket can be understood if
we understand the popularity of cinema in India, which produces
a phenomenal 1000-odd movies a year. (India also plays more
one-day matches than any other country.) Popular cinema in
India, be it from Bollywood or Kollywood (as Tamil filmdom
is called), which began its career by retelling brahmanic-Hindu
mythologies, continues to be a major site which sustains and
nurtures the caste system and the brahmanical social order.
While Valentines Day comes to be celebrated in select
urban pockets, only post-Hindutva  and it is repressive
Hindutva which finds this unacceptable not many question
the consensus over the continuing ban on kissing in Indian
cinema.

Caste
profile of one team each from 1970s/ 80s/ 90s

THE
B-TEAMS...
The 1996 Indian team that played England in the Birmingham
test. Only the skipper, Azharuddin, is a non-Hindu. All
others are brahman/ upper caste.

Cultural
studies scholars have extensively deli-berated on why kissing
and sex scenes are almost self-censored in India. They would
benefit by looking for answers in caste taboos. Caste-conscious
Hindus are extremely touchy about jootha (contact through
saliva, yechchal in Tamil) and kissing can be the most despicable
jootha act. And you certainly cannot indulge in it publicly.
While Hindi films celebrate the act of the wife eating the
leftovers in the husbands plate, even married couples
cannot kiss on screen. Before saying All this in the
land of Khajuraho and Kamasutra, we must remember that
more than these two Ks, it is the strictures in Brahma Purana
and Shiva Purana  which encourage only coital/reproductive
sex, quite like the older Gandhi did  that caste Hindus
take seriously (see Sudhir Kakars Intimate Relations,
1989).

If even
kissing and making love have to be seen as subversive in popular
cinema, one may well understand why nothing really subversive
is possible in this genre. Yet, cinema has emerged as the
most popular cultural form in post-British India as much has
cricket has emerged as the most popular sport. Both cinema
and cricket in their banyan-like existence have prevented
the growth of anything under their unhealthy shadows. Fluff
like Lagaan and false icons like Sachin are the best that
these institutions can throw up; their worst  match-fixing
and Gadar.

(Author's
note: Some of the reflections on cinema were triggered by
a conversation with Ravikumar, President, PUCL Tamil Nadu-Pondicherry.
I owe the point on disability and cricket players to NU Abhilash,
researching cricket in the UK, who also helped compile the
teams. By way of clarification on the quote at the beginning
of the essay, Ambedkar, like other male writers of his time,
uses man in the generic sense to refer to all
of humankind and not in the sexual/ masculine sense)

Published on: March 04, 2002
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